William Henry Harrison (1773 - 1841)
John Tyler (1790 - 1862)
Harrison's tomb in North Bend, Ohio
April 4th 1841: President Harrison dies
On this day in 1841, the ninth President of the United States - William Henry Harrison - died in office. Harrison was a former military officer, and saw active duty in the United States’ many wars against Native-Americans, and from this position arose to Governor of the Indiana Territory. One of Harrison’s most famous engagements during his army career was the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, which earned him the nickname ‘Old Tippecanoe’. Indeed, in 1840 once Harrison was nominated for President with John Tyler as his running mate, a popular Whig campaign song celebrated ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler too’. The Whig campaign sought to present Harrison as a ‘man of the people’, stressing his hard cider and log cabin roots. He won the election, but Harrison’s time in office was the shortest of any U.S. President, serving only 32 days. He died of complications from pneumonia which he supposedly caught at his inauguration, held in the middle of winter, as he did not want to look old and so refused to wear a coat. Harrison was the oldest President to take office, aged 68, until Ronald Reagan in 1981. In 1841, for the first time in American history, a President had died in office, and his Vice-President - in this case John Tyler - became President. Tyler’s record in office was hardly illustrious, and he so alienated voters and politicians that he left office with the support of neither of the main parties.
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